From Office Hours: Apple Motion 5 feature requests

This excerpt from Office Hours is a short discussion about Apple Motion 5. I asked Alex Lindsay what features he would like to see in Motion that would appeal to those running live streaming events ([1:25:28] into this YouTube video).

He answered:

• Live output
• Improved TGA output for Compressor and Motion
• Custom reflection maps for USDZ scenes
• Same 3D features for USDZ models that Motion already has for 3D text

I added:

• WebM export so animations made in Motion can be used by HTML-based streaming output systems
• Two screen mode so that published parameters can be modified on one screen with the results instantly visible on an output sent to the stream or video switcher

Alex Lindsay:

True frame sync – playing back at exactly 29.97 frames a second.

The number one thing a layout system needs to do is not lose a frame.

I think that means it would be useful if Motion could have a profiling feature so that it could estimate whether or not it can stick to the frame rate required. Or a record of what the frame rate actually was while a project was playing back – beyond the ‘FPS’ readout at the top of the viewer.

Alex went on to say that he thinks that achieving true frame sync is such a tough problem that Apple won’t assign the required engineering resources to it.

Apple Keynote and Motion

We then moved on to how Apple’s Keynote presentation application could be integrated to Apple Motion 5.

• All Keynote transitions and animation features should be behaviors in Motion
• Motion’s behaviors should be in Keynote
• Motion should be able to open Keynote presentations – for further animation refinement, and to help people understand Motion

Office Hours

Office Hours is a daily conversation and continuing community about online events and the future of media. I wrote about it ‘Office Hours: The media and digital event community’.